YEARS before Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci allegedly picked up a baseball bat in Howard Beach and, according to cops, attacked a black man who was there to steal a car, he picked up a microphone at a lounge in Lake George.

“He was about 5,” his mother, Maria Minucci, told The Post. “He had disappeared. I was horrified. All of a sudden, they put a spotlight on the stage and Nick walked out and sang, ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’ ”

Two weeks ago, cops said Nick and buddies Anthony Ench and Frank Agostini attacked three black men who had roamed into their Queens neighborhood to steal a car. Minucci and Agostini each said the black men had tried to steal from each of them earlier in the evening, arguing that the attack was retaliation – not a hate crime.

The Minucci family says that Nick is many things but not a racist and that he is being hung out to dry to quash a potential racial uprising during a mayoral election year.

The man attacked with the bat, Glen Moore, suffered a fractured skull, and his sneakers were stolen.

Minucci, 19, is being held in a Rockland County jail without bail. In a two-hour sit-down with The Post, his family talked about his life – in an attempt to counteract the popular portrayal of him as a monster.

He has drawn cartoons since he was a toddler and even helped draw the mural on the front of JHS 226 in Ozone Park, where he’d been sent because of its advanced art program.

His lounge act marked the first time his mother realized that her son had a taste for the stage. When he was 8, she signed him up at Little Stars, a Staten Island talent agency.

A few years later, the agency asked him to try out for a new HBO show. He got a bit part in the first episode of “The Sopranos,” the first in a string of brushes with televised mobsters and the family members of real ones.

He was called back for another shoot, but the family was on vacation and his mother turned them down.

“I thought it was a show about singers,” she said. “Nobody knew what ‘The Sopranos’ was.”

Minucci quenched his thirst for the spotlight more recently in episodes of “Growing Up Gotti,” after meeting the stars of the show while working at their uncle Peter Gotti’s bakery, Uncle Crumb’s in Lindenwood, the family said. Minucci again appeared with the Gotti brood in the video for rapper Cassidy’s song “I’m a Hustla.”

The video, which glorifies street scams and in which the black rapper employs the n-word more than a dozen times, was filmed in mid-February in Philadelphia.

Like Minucci, the rapper Cassidy is also sitting in the slammer these days; he’s facing murder charges in an April shooting outside his Philly home.

In a special behind-the-scenes segment on the CD-video combo, Minucci is seen hanging out with the Gotti boys and throwing his arms around Cassidy in a bear hug.

“A racist is going to do that?” his grandfather Dominick Minucci asked about his grandson’s presence in a black rapper’s video. “They’re calling him a racist. They’re calling my whole family racists.

“We’re not racists,” he repeatedly said, pointing out that his family’s church is mostly black and pulling out pictures of Nick at one of his childhood birthday parties with black and Hispanic friends.

NICK was born in 1986 and named after his uncle, who was killed in 1982 in a street robbery for $12 – a parallel to Nick’s statement that he was attacked by the three black men with a screwdriver, his lawyer says. His father left Maria when Nick was a toddler. He now lives in Florida, but no one in the family will divulge his name or any details about him. When Nick was young, he often went to church with his grandmother, Theresa, who died in 1999.

“Everybody would just stare at him. He was this little boy, this baby, who knew all the Rosary,” said his uncle, Anthony Minucci.

When Theresa was homebound with lung cancer, Nick was by her bedside every day.

Dominick and Theresa spared nothing on their only grandson. “He was spoiled,” said Anthony with a laugh. “He’s my only nephew.” The $500 paintball gun Nick was charged with shooting at a turbaned Sikh on 9/11 was a gift from his grandmother to be used at their timeshare in the Poconos.

The $4,000 neck chain he was wearing the night of the Howard Beach incident was a gift from his grandfather.

When Dominick visited Nick in jail last week, his grandson asked, “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” His grandfather replied, “I could never be mad at you.”

When it comes to Nick’s brushes with the law, his family is steadfast in its defense. He was young when the incident with the Sikh happened, and everybody was worked up over 9/11, they say.

The stabbing of a 15-year-old in Howard Beach, which Nick was charged in, has been misrepresented, the family says.

“It has been misreported,” said his attorney, Lori Zeno. “He was never accused of being the stabber. He never pled guilty to being the stabber.”

She said that he was charged for acting in consort in the stabbing and that she plans to file a motion to have the case against him dismissed because of what she calls the district attorney’s misconduct in releasing Minucci’s sealed juvenile record.